This week 10 founders shipped in a single day

"It's easier to get to market today, but much harder to stay there."

Last week, Harold Hughes said this during a panel I moderated at Founder Jam. He’s an angel investor, two time tech founder, and someone who's seen the cycle play out more times than most. He's 100% right.. AI’s made it trivially easy to build something. The hard part isn't building anymore, it's knowing whether what you built actually matters to anyone and if you can sustain it for the long term.

That tension was the undercurrent of Founder Jam, a full-day workshop that we (StealthX) co-host with Innovate Charlotte. We had 10 early-stage founders with two tracks (Product and Growth). We spend a full day to help them go from idea to evidence. It wasn’t a pitch competition, a networking event, or a session to make a pitch deck. It was completely focused on rapidly defining their strategy and building/shipping a solution.

Here's what I took away from the day, and why I think speed to value is the single most important capability teams should be focused on right now.

There's a difference between going fast and going somewhere.

Ben Granger, who leads brand strategy at First Horizon Bank, put it perfectly during the panel. "There's never a right time to launch, but there's definitely a not right time." His framing was "clarity over polish," which means getting your diagnosis right before you start optimizing the execution.

Blair Primis, Chief Growth Officer at OrthoCarolina, built on that with a phrase I'm going to steal. "There's freedom within the framework." In healthcare, you can't move fast and break things. But inside guardrails, you can move with real urgency and creativity. That concept applies to every founder in the room. Constraints aren't the enemy of speed. They're what makes speed productive.

Harold took it further. “Forget the MVP,” he said. “Think maximum viable non-product." What's the most you can build that isn't actually a thing, but helps you learn really fast? That reframe changes the goal. You're not trying to ship a product. You're trying to ship a learning.

The founders who move fastest aren't the ones with the most code. They're the ones who compress the distance between "I think this matters" and "I have evidence that it does."

This isn't theoretical. Here's what ten founders actually shipped in a single day.

One founder connected his CRM data to Claude Code, benchmarked his sales team's performance (0.7 bookings per week per rep versus the 6 per week needed to hit his revenue target), and built a branded pricing calculator and a full sales playbook. He called the experience "phenomenal" and "a game changer." That calculator had been on his roadmap for a year and a half. It got done in one session.

Another early stage non-technical founder fed a transcript from the morning into Claude Code, created a brand style guide, built a full marketing website with signup flows for three different user types, and built his final presentation. When I walked away from his table, he deployed it himself. No engineering team. No dev agency. Just a founder and AI.

Another founder built an SEO blog post, researched high-ranking keywords, and created a repair-vs-replace calculator that captures emails for a drip sequence.

Four of the ten founders, independently and without coordination, built calculators as their primary lead magnet. That pattern emerged organically from the growth track methodology. When you define your ICP, design your offer, and think about distribution, a calculator is often the fastest path to a signal. It captures intent, delivers value, and gives you an email address.

For this cohort I built out 19 Claude Code skills to help accelerate the startups. Ten were for the workshop day, nine are for post-workshop growth operations. They follow a structured sequence so founders aren't just "using AI." They're working through a validated methodology.

Founders on the product track moved from competitive analysis (battle cards) to strategic hypothesis generation (scored and ranked) to rapid prototyping. Growth Track founders move from ICP definition (Jobs-to-be-Done) to offer design (lead magnets and nurture sequences) to distribution automation (with a 30-day validation plan).

Every skill reads from and writes to a shared config file, so context flows between them. When you define your ICP in one skill, the offer designer skill already knows who you're targeting. When you build a lead magnet, the validation planner skill already knows what to measure. It's a system, not a collection of prompts.

I open sourced the entire skill pack at github.com/stealthxco/founderjamskills. Clone the repo, run the install script, and have all 19 skills working in Claude Code in about five minutes.

Whether you're a founder working through product-market fit, a growth operator trying to systematize your go-to-market, or just someone who wants to see what a structured AI workflow looks like in practice, it's there for you.

The panel conversation kept circling back to one question. How do you know if you've got something?

Harold's answer was direct. "If you ask for money, you get feedback. If you ask for feedback, sometimes you get money." He wished he'd started charging sooner. The free trial, the freemium tier, the "we'll figure out monetization later" approach, it delays the only signal that actually matters. Will someone pay for this?

Chris Hart, founder of IntrosMatter, offered a counterintuitive take. "Negative feedback is better than apathy." He told a story about a customer who had a terrible onboarding experience and then spent 45 minutes on the phone giving detailed, specific feedback about what went wrong. At the end, Chris asked if he could call back when the issues were fixed. The customer said, "Yeah, call me. I want this to work." That's a signal. Apathy, where people try your product and just never come back, is the real killer.

John Espey, Chief Growth Officer at Mastodon Technologies, added a nuance that I think founders miss. "The renewal is where I really feel traction. It's easier to sign somebody up the first time, but if they renew, you've got a relationship." First revenue is a signal. Repeat revenue is evidence.

The common denominator across all of these is the same.. speed to value isn't about how fast you can build. It's about how fast you can get to a signal that tells you whether to keep going, adjust, or stop. A payment, a complaint, a renewal, an email signup on a calculator you built in a couple hours. That's what matters.

Founder Jam started as a coffee conversation with Juan Garzón from Innovate Charlotte in 2024. Seeing it come to life with this many founders, facilitators, and community members working together in one room was something else. The amount of work each startup got done in a single day was more than most would get through in weeks. Speed to value isn't a slogan, it's a practice. And the folks who figure it out first are the ones who'll still be here when the market gets harder.

Onward & upward,
Drew

P.s. If we haven’t met yet, hello! I’m Drew Burdick, Founder and Managing Partner at StealthX. We work with brands to design & build great customer experiences that win. I share ideas weekly through this newsletter & over on the Building Great Experiences podcast. Have a question? Feel free to contact us, I’d love to hear from you.